Science

xchrom

(108,903 posts) Sat Jan 28, 2012, 03:11 PM Jan 2012

A physiological marker for false memories

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/neurophilosophy/2012/jan/27/1

Our memories are not as accurate as we like to think they are. Every recollection is a reconstructive process, involving stitching together memory fragments rather than reproducing a ready-made whole. Inevitably, errors creep in, but in most cases our memories are accurate enough to be reliable. In some cases, however, they are not, the most striking example being false memories, or completely fabricated accounts of events that did not happen.

False memories are easily created. Our memories of historical events can be manipulated with doctored photographs; psychiatrists have been known to implant false memories of childhood sexual abuse and Satanic rituals in patients; and false memories are the most likely explanation for claims of alien abduction. All of this has profound and wide-ranging implications, but as yet there is no reliable way of determining whether a memory is true or false. Researchers from the University of Giessen in Germany now report that a simple physiological test can distinguish between false memories real ones.

Ali Baioui and his colleagues used a variation of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, a well established method for creating false memories in the experimental setting. In a standard DRM study, participants are first given a list of 12 closely related words (such as bed, pillow, sheet and so on) to study and learn. Immediately afterwards, they are given another list, containing some of the same words, as well as 'lures' that are associated with them (sleep and dream, for example), and asked to indicate which were included in the first list. This typically produces a high rate of false recall, so that participants wrongly indicating that many of the lures were on the first list.